Who said marriage is dead?

After 28 years, Stuart Jeffries and his partner decided to tie the knot. It was to be a purely pragmatic exercise – no fuss, no guests, no trimmings. But somehow emotion crept in … Below, Pete May explains why he finally got married after 12 years

Stuart Jeffries: 'We entered into our married state with no sense that we'd take pleasure in our big day.' Photograph: Diana Lundin/Getty Images

There was no stag do in Prague, no ladies' karaoke night, no wedding list, no inter-family brawl over the buffet, no best man's speech, no guests or reception, no God or gods, no bended knee, no honeymoon (so far), and no five-figure debt – but somehow, this year, I managed to get married.

Yes, after living together for 28 years, Kay and I tied the knot.

I know what you're thinking. That sounds just the recipe for a lovely, memorable, moving day. Well, actually it was all those things because, despite our careful planning, we got caught out. Both of us, and our daughter, Juliet, got blindsided by emotion.

But why were we getting married at all? Everything had been great for 28 years and, these days, no one needs to bother with all that fuss.

"In most European countries, the wedding ceremony has become simply useless," writes the French sociologist Pascal Bruckner in his new book, Has Marriage for Love Failed? "There is no longer any need to marry to live together or to have children."

Well, Bruckner's second sentence is true: Kay and I have lived together for nearly three decades, and seven years ago had Juliet without God or the state conferring their, frankly unsought, blessing. But his first sentence is not true – at least not true of Britain.

Why were we getting married? Because of intimations of mortality: we are getting older and thinking more about what happens financially if one of us dies, and about how to ensure that our money goes to our daughter when we aren't around any more. And in thinking about all that, we came to the conclusion that getting married would better help our finances now and our daughter's in the future.

But despite all these advantages, would getting married make us happier? The Daily Mail suggested so. Its recent headline said: "Marriage is the secret to happiness: Tying the knot makes us more content than money, children or having a degree." The newspaper quoted an Office for National Statistics report: "Holding all else equal and comparing people according to their relationship status shows that married people and those in civil partnerships rate their 'life satisfaction', the sense that their activities are 'worthwhile', and 'happiness yesterday', significantly higher than cohabiting couples, single, divorced and widowed people."

Is that true? Could Kay and I expect marriage to bring not just financial breaks, but an infusion of happiness? It seemed implausible. What was lacking from this statisticians' eulogy to the institution of marriage was an explanation of why one might be happier married than living together. Perhaps, and this is just a thought, married people are more likely to be dishonest about their feelings than cohabitees – in part, because they have spent so much on getting married that they daren't put the kibosh on their investment.

Maybe, then, we were making a terrible mistake. Hadn't Kay and I lived together happily for all this time without taking marriage vows? Hadn't our relationship endured long after many marriages had failed? True, we had never shelled out for catering, a marquee and a clergyman to make our commitment to each other gaudily public, but we loved and honoured each other as any married couple. And we had stuck it out together for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, in riches and in voluntary redundancy, without the prod of a marital contract.

But if we did marry, we thought, one benefit was that we could ditch the term "partner" – which always made us sound as if we were in business together or gay. Not that there's anything wrong with being in business together – or gay. It's just that we aren't.

Now, though, I can call Kay my wife, which defuses misconstrual. I know. Big whoop. And Kay can call me her husband, which, even if it does – serious face – legitimise patriarchy, makes things easier when she is trying to explain her domestic arrangements to call-centre workers.

In the end, we married because we wanted to secure all of our financial futures as much as possible. We entered into our married state sceptically, pragmatically and with no sense that we'd take pleasure in our big day.

But it didn't quite work out as we planned.

One Friday morning, Kay put on a beautiful dress, I put on the suit I'd last worn for my dad's funeral, Juliet came out of her bedroom in a lovely frock we had bought for the occasion, and we got into a minicab to go to the register office in the town hall. We stopped to pick up a posy from the florist for Juliet. Already we were entangled in traditional wedding-day moves. Suits. Posies. Taxis. If this really was the purely bureaucratic exchange we had intended, we would have gone on the bus in jeans. We clearly were not as non-conformist as we had hoped.

As the three of us sat in the lobby awaiting our noon appointment, I felt we cut an emotionally vulnerable and eccentric trio. We had no confetti, and had forgotten to bring a camera. We had no guests – in fact, we hadn't told anyone what we were up to. We would tell our friends and relatives later, and sweeten any disappointment they felt at not being invited by sending them slices of the cake Kay had baked for just that purpose.

When I later told my brother, Neil, what Kay and I had done, he wondered if we had got married because my mother's death last autumn had made me want to get serious. Perhaps that was part of it, though it was not a reason I would have cited to Kay. "Hey, baby, just realised we're going to die and we ought to put our affairs in order. Want to get married?"

Eventually, we were taken to room 99 where we filled in forms with fountain pens, giving the procedure a faux-classy, 19th-century vibe. There were two female registrars and, for witnesses, two female council workers. I was pleased I didn't have to bribe strangers at a bus stop to be witnesses.

I soured the mood somewhat by complaining that the service was sexist because I'd had to disclose my father's name and occupation for the marriage certificate. Why shouldn't Islington council want to know that Ivy Miriam Jeffries was a civil servant just as much as that Kenneth William Jeffries was a production engineer?

But then something unexpected happened. The registrar said: "The purpose of marriage is that you always love, care for and support each other through both the joys and sorrows of life." Kay started crying. This wasn't part of the plan. Then I started welling up. What was all that about? How could those words mean anything? Hadn't we been loving each other ever since the release of Scritti Politti's single The Word Girl in 1985? We had, but the registrar's words solemnised our deeds, underwrote our commitment to the future, tugged at our heart strings. Or something like that.

Then Juliet performed her task. She reached into a little spangled bag and gave us back our two rings that we had bought on the 10th anniversary of living together. And, finally, the registrar said the words I am chiefly familiar with from disastrous soap-opera weddings. "If any person here present knows of any lawful impediment to this marriage, they should now declare it."

The rest of the morning is a blur. I hugged four local authority workers before leaving room 99. Two of them accompanied us on to the town hall steps and scooped up the confetti from the previous wedding and scattered it over me and the person Juliet calls my awful wedded wife.

Then we jumped into another cab and dropped Juliet off at her friend Margot's birthday party at a pizza restaurant.

And so began the long, and as it turned out, lovely fuss of making our nuptials public. At the restaurant, Margot's parents congratulated us, small party-going girls laughed at us before losing interest in our relationship in favour of garlic bread. We left Juliet with Margot's mum and dad and went, just the two of us, to the pub. If anyone is annoyed about the manner of our getting wed, they haven't said so.

We sat in the beer garden near the rusting barbecue under the many greys of a London sky and drank wine. What happened next? Maybe Kay asked me if I felt any different. Maybe I said I'm too dazed to know what I feel.

Have we done the right thing? We are sceptical about any Panglossian perspective on marriage, especially the Daily Mail's. What about Bruckner's dystopian vision, whereby love – which was supposed to be contained and preserved by the institution of marriage – blows it up? I suspect he is right about that: if you enter into a marriage thinking it will guarantee fidelity or ringfence your love for each other from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, you are nuts. Marriage, thus conceived, is a delusion from which we all deserve to be disabused.

"Let us be glad, in a way," Bruckner writes, "that matrimonial utopias have collapsed: this proves that love retains its subversive power, that it remains the inconvenient demon who eats his own children by multiplying his demands."

Quite so, but there are other demons and other kinds of love than those he considers. The inconvenient demon that made us get married was the one who gives cohabitees fewer rights than married couples.

And the other kinds of love? The love we have for each other, and the love we have for our daughter, that makes us want to safeguard our mutual futures as much as possible. Newlyweds weren't supposed to have daughters, still less to have married to make their children's futures as bright as possible. Has marriage for love failed? Not quite. For us, at least, marriage has become a necessary evil, but, paradoxically, no less lovely for that.

Pete May and Nicola on their wedding day: 'We were under pressure from our daughters, then seven and four, who kept asking why we weren't married.'

Why it took 12 years and two children to persuade us to marry

We married in 2005 after 12 years together. Why didn't we do it earlier? Well, we had two children, a shared mortgage and a signed Parental Responsibility Agreement. Surely you couldn't show more commitment? Early on, Nicola had declared that marriage was a patriarchal institution and she never wanted it.

Like most men, I was scared of commitment, but more so of the tyranny of the seating plan. While my lower-middle-class family was small in number, Nicola's upper middle-class tribe required the presence of a diaspora of distant cousins at weddings and more negotiations over the pew arrangements than many a UN security council meeting.

But then Nicola started sighing that we were getting old and she wouldn't even have any wedding pictures of when we were young. So on Valentine's Day 2003 I presented her with a marriage voucher, redeemable at the time of her choosing, or in any year when West Ham were promoted, Doctor Who returned and England won the Ashes … none of which, I thought, would ever happen.

We were under pressure from our daughters, then seven and four, who kept asking why we weren't married. Couldn't they wear their bridesmaids' dresses from Uncle Drew's wedding? Meanwhile, my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and we thought perhaps we should marry while she could still remember it.

Then – incredibly – after an absence of 16 years, Doctor Who returned in March 2005. In May that year, West Ham were promoted to the Premier League. And at the end of the summer, England won the Ashes after 16 years.

That autumn we decided to do it and take control of the event. We booked the local ecology centre for the reception, asked people to bring homemade cakes, invited only friends and close relatives and did the whole thing for £200 without a seating plan.

I got to wear my one suit and Nicola borrowed a white coat from a stylish friend. I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles was played on the church organ and we had possibly the only example of a vicar asking, in reference to our twin obsessions: "How can we reconcile West Ham and Friends of the Earth?"

Our daughters loved dressing up. My mum's memory was fading, but she knew she'd been to a good party, while my dad enjoyed the free drinks.

My football pals got to chant: "You're not single any more!" The speeches were genuinely touching, and we got to leave early to catch the Eurostar to Lille. It was, to quote the U2 song we had played on the church organ, a Beautiful Day. Pete May